


i woke up in my shoes again but somewhere you exist

by elainebarrish



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, i tried™, this is not ...... great
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 06:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10759044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elainebarrish/pseuds/elainebarrish
Summary: ""Did you get my email?”“I may have… glanced at it.” Jyn doesn’t look up from her plate, fork held uselessly in her right hand."jyn sticks around the rebel base. her and mothma become... something.





	i woke up in my shoes again but somewhere you exist

**Author's Note:**

  * For [helenecixous](https://archiveofourown.org/users/helenecixous/gifts).



> title from young and menace - fob bc lbr ,,,,, it's a jyn erso song. this is not particularly good sry guys I just wanted 2 Contribute also I have 7500 words due for uni by friday so here's what I did instead

Jyn comes crawling back, hauls herself on a shuttle and makes her way back to base, back to this rebellion that fights for something that she doesn’t believe in. Mon Mothma thanks her, they all do, and she fades into the background, to nurse her wounds, safe in the knowledge that she did what her father wanted, what he couldn’t. She stays at the base, stays and cheers when the Death Star is destroyed, stays even when Mon Mothma tells her that she isn’t obligated to, and she sometimes goes to meetings that she still gets invitations to to get a glimpse of what the rebellion is doing now. She spends more of her time than she’d like to admit wondering whether it was worth her getting out of there, whether it’s worth her being one of the only ones to survive once again, because everyone she’s cared about is dead, and they don’t make her pay rent to stay here, and she doesn’t know if she wants to go back out into the world of living from job to job, rented spaces on ships with people she doesn’t know, touching down in more places that she recognises but doesn’t have anyone there to go back to.

Mon Mothma sends her an email that she outright ignores, and she spends two days in her bunk as an excuse not to communicate with the outside world, because Mon Mothma noticing that she’s stuck around is the last thing she wants. It’s in the mess hall that she finally manages to pin Jyn down, and the look of exasperation on her face is almost worth how fruitless avoiding her was.

“Did you get my email?”

“I may have… glanced at it.” Jyn doesn’t look up from her plate, fork held uselessly in her right hand.

“Then you’ll know that you have somewhere to be right now.”

“If this is the helping them unload cargo shit then I’m not interested.” She looks up at this, glares at Mon Mothma standing unhelpfully across from her, leaning against the table so she can raise her eyebrows as meaningfully as possible.

“Look Jyn, we’ve given you time and space and now you need to return to actually aiding the rebellion, even if you don’t want to leave the base.”

“Who says I don’t want to leave the base?” She asks, just because she doesn’t like this authority over her, just because she can’t help but challenge it. 

“Jyn when was the last time you had a shower?”

She mutters into her plate at that, ignores the raised eyebrow, ignores how Mon Mothma straightens up and fixes her with a look that says something final. 

“I expect you out in the cargo bay bright and early tomorrow morning.”

Jyn sighs, but she nods, sort of, mostly shrugging like she doesn’t mind anyway, and when Mon Mothma leaves she blows air up at her fringe and slumps even further in her seat.

Mon Mothma is waiting for her when she rolls out into the cargo bay, still pulling her jacket on, flicking her wet ponytail out from under her collar, and she nods and smiles, ignoring the half asleep but also full of rage look on her face and the steaming cup of coffee clutched tightly in one hand.

“Ah, I see you made it.” She grunts in response and she just nods, fighting a smile, leaving the way Jyn came in when she starts throwing things across the cargo bay, muttering under her breath about “this fucking resistance” and “fucking people who think they can tell me what to do”. 

Jyn stays annoyed, stays angry, keeps muttering while she settles into doing whatever menial task she’s been assigned now, but she’d be lying if she said that going to bed exhausted wasn’t helping, lying if she did that she didn’t enjoy the ache and pull of her muscles, the way it distracts her just enough that she can’t drift off into thinking about leaving them all, all her team, how they died on some random Imperial moon. Mon Mothma sends her an email each morning, tells her where to be and what to do, and she maybe has some things to say when she ends up spending an entire morning sweeping, but she always just looks amused by Jyn’s mutterings, just always almost smiles through a torrent of not particularly focused abuse. The thing that Jyn swears at the most is the sun, anyway. 

Her strength comes back and with that so does her need to do something bigger, to move on to some other place, the knowledge that she’s ready to go back to fighting, that she can go back to fighting, it draws her to want to leave. She wants to leave the people that nod at her in the hallway and the people who smile at her when they see her swearing as she performs some random task that feels more like a punishment than anything else. She wants to get away from these people before she gets attached and they somehow die, because while she doesn’t truly believe that she’s a curse, that people will always die, she has so far been the only common denominator in these people’s lives. The rest of her, the logical, sensible part, blames the Empire, sometimes blames the rebellion, and so much of her just wants to get away, to get away before Mon Mothma starts looking too fond of her, because she searches for her each morning now, searches out her eye roll when she starts muttering abuse at the mop or the boxes or that one broken broom. She plays up to it, and she doesn’t admit it, but she thinks that Mon Mothma knows, that the quality of her eye rolls has changed to fond and amused instead of exasperated and confused. 

Jyn isn’t paying attention when she comes looking for her, is slacking off by sitting behind some boxes and hoping no one will notice her, holding her fringe off of her face because it’s so warm out where there isn’t air conditioning. Mon Mothma looms up behind some boxes, and Jyn jumps, mutters fuck and holds her chest, while she just tries very hard not to crack a smile and is not wholly successful.

“There’s a meeting in ten minutes I thought you’d want to be present for.”

“And you couldn’t just email me that?” she asks, but she’s standing up, stretching her tired limbs, leading the way back into the base.

“Why would I do that when I know there’s no chance that you would see it until this evening or probably tomorrow?”

She shrugs because she knows that Mothma’s right, and turns to her with a small smile that’s really more of a teasing smirk. “Really you just came out all of this way to see me. I didn’t even know that you were able to leave the building.”

“Why wouldn’t I be able to leave the building?”

“I don’t know, snipers or something. Aren’t you high ups too important to be out here potentially risking your lives?”

“We “high ups” occasionally like to indulge in something called sunlight,” she pauses, almost smiling. “And the council are not always… my favourite people.”

“Did you use me as an excuse to get out of a really boring meeting?”

“Of course not. I just felt that it might be time for you to return to active duty.”

“What makes you think I want to return?”

“You’re someone that always wants to leave, to move on, that much is obvious from what little you’d tell anyone about your past movements,” Mothma shrugged, smoothly, like she’d scripted it to be there. “And we really would appreciate your help.”

“Well you've piqued my interest but I'm not quite sure you all know me as well as you'd like to think you do.”

“We’ll see.”

Jyn ends up leaving, ends up retrieving something, ends up doing the things that you'd never see a Jedi doing, and she comes back with a full team. It’s a rare, odd thing, this kind of comfortable, casual friendship that she ends up having with them all, and she can't help but think what if Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi had gotten out of there, what if they'd ended up being part of this ragtag team that had somehow gotten in and out without taking any fire to any important body parts. Mon Mothma is there when she gets back, and she smiles and nods and doesn't send her any emails for at least a week, and she thinks that maybe her weird form of punishment or reintegration or whatever that was was over. Jyn goes out again and again, doing odd missions that require her sort of dogged determination and ability to think in the heat of the moment, that require violence but also occasionally charm. Mothma is there every time she gets back, and she doesn't say anything when Jyn starts lingering in the control room, when she starts lounging around in the background making the place untidy. 

The panic is still there, buried underneath proof of how she can get things done without being the only one that makes it back, the proof that she can exist around people without it necessarily leading to untreatable wounds and her crying quietly in her bunk. There's a part of her that tells her that it's just because none of these people are anyone she loves, anyone she could grow to love, but sometimes she looks at Mothma through the blue of a hologram of some blueprints or of someone she's firmly but quietly arguing with, and she thinks that maybe she’s lying to herself. From emails to small smirks and her quiet but reassuring presence she thinks that maybe this woman is someone she could grow to become attached to, attached like she hadn't let herself be in what felt like a very long time. The best part, she lets herself think, is that there's no way Mothma has any feelings towards her, that she just views her as some sort of stray that needs feeding and a purpose to keep her warm at night. She ignores small smiles and the way that her frown sometimes softens, that deep crease between her eyebrows becoming less pronounced, and she ignores that sometimes Mothma sits down next to her, never flops though she can feel the way that she restrains herself, and makes light conversation about nothing. She realises that she doesn't know anything about her, that Mothma knows all because she's read her file, because she's the one that found her when she thought she'd been lost for good.

It’s not until Jyn loses someone on her team, not until she's curled up in a back corner of the base where she thought that no one would find her, that her and Mothma have a real conversation. Jyn is stuck on one thing; that she let someone in, formed something close to a friendship, and they died while out on a mission with her, died following her orders, died helping her. Mothma finds her, somehow, in that mess of corridors and empty rooms and storage cupboards, and she finally does something that is almost a flop, onto the hard and dirty metal floor next to her, ignoring her tears and the way that she sniffs to collect herself, not saying anything until Jyn has collected herself into something that she is vaguely comfortable showing to the world.

“Do you know how many people I've lost on missions that I've deemed necessary?” she asks, quietly, looking down at her sparkling white robes that are sure to have black marks all down the back of them now, and Jyn looks at her uncertainly.

“No?”

“Neither do I,” she says, equally as quiet, and she looks up and makes eye contact with one of the strongest soldiers she has in her arsenal, one of the strongest people she knows. “There's been so many that it would be pointless, impossible even, to keep track. We lose people every day and it’s on me. I get angry partners and crying children who ask me why, and I just steel my resolve and harden my jaw and I don't cry because if it hurts for me I can't even imagine how it feels for them.” 

Jyn realises how little she’d considered that Mothma doesn't send people out lightly, that she doesn't send people to do the dirty work in the same kind of uncaring and harsh manner that the Empire does, that all this time she was still seeing her as some sort of general when she should have been seeing her as she was, as a leader trying to pull these people together, as someone chasing after hope. “How do you manage?” she asks just as quietly, soft and unsure and unlike herself.

“Not thinking about something goes a long way in coping with it, if not dealing with it,” she sighs, scrubs a hand across her face. “That doesn't help me sleep the first night after I send you back out there though.”

She can't help the small smile that creeps across her face, can’t help the teasing. “Aw Mothma don't tell me you're soft on me.”

“I’m soft on nothing but the rebellion,” she paused, smiling a little. “And I guess you’ve helped us.” 

“So you like me… because I'm a useful tool?” she pushed, smiling, expecting Mothma to backpedal, expecting something other than a shrug.

“I suppose so. Or maybe it’s having someone around to roll my eyes at when another ambassador says something unhelpful.”

“I can't believe you like me,” she teased, basically ignoring Mothma. “That's so cute.” 

“That’s also not what I said,” she points out, but her voice isn't cutting like Jyn knows it can be, and somehow she can't seem stern while sitting on the floor. Right now, in this space, she's just a woman that Jyn has a crush on, a woman that has admitted she likes her, and Jyn always takes opportunities where they're given to her, takes them even when it could go badly, follows her impulses until the end. It’s impulsive when she leans over, impulsive when she slides her hand across her jaw, curls it around her neck, buries her fingers in her short hair, impulsive when she hovers, for a second, just to see if Mothma will push her away, and not quite impulsive as she closes the distance, as she kisses her on this random dirty metal floor. She distantly thinks about ruining her white clothes but then she’s distracted by Mothma kissing back, and she realises that she hasn't potentially ruined staying on this base for much longer. She’s still scared, still worried that she's some sort of doomed, still terrified that Mothma will get hurt and it’ll be her fault, but Mothma’s done a lot of her own hurting, is responsible for a lot of things that are wholly her own, and she wants to hear about them, want to hear her voice shake in the middle of the night as she whispers the names of people that she's lost. Jyn thinks about how often people forget that this is war, how easy it is for them to sit back and challenge decisions made by people that are just trying to do their best, people whose best is much better than anyone really ever expected.


End file.
